This week I was mainly wearing my design hat and working on some cover design stuff for my books, with the initial work on the cover of the fourth book still in process and some tweaks being made to the covers for the other books in the series.
Proof Copies for Book Four
This week I received the Kindle Direct Print proof copies for Blood Answer, the fourth and final book in the series. That’s what you see above. I have not yet done a cover reveal for this book so this is a sort of sneak peak for you, my loyal readers. It’s also a not quite final version. there are still some tweaks I want to make to get everything just right. So, it will be a little while yet before that cover reveal happens.

Spark Notes
As I’ve mentioned previously, I’m doing a perhaps absurd amount of editions for the books in the series with two different trade paperbacks one published via Amazon’s KDP and the other through Ingram Spark plus a regular print hardcover as well as a large print hardcover published by way of Ingram Spark. Well, guess what? All of those books need covers.
Although the basic front cover remains the same, the dimensions and layout are slightly different for each version which means I’m essentially doing cover design work four times over with each book in the series. There’s a lot of copying and pasting involved, but also a fair amount of tweaking and finagling (technical terms, I assure you) to get everything just right on each layout.
This week, I spent time working on laying out the Ingram Spark covers for the third book in the series. Above you can see the proof for the regular print hardcover dust jacket. I do review the e-proofs but will probably also order print proofs just to check things over because things do look different in print than they do on the screen.
Part of the process of approving the e-proof on Ingram Spark is that they ask if you want to promote the book in their print catalog which they mail to bookstores. It costs $85 to have an annotation in Ingram Advance and everything I’ve read indicates this probably isn’t helpful. So, I think I might skip this advertisement, but if you have had some unbelieavably good experience with Ingram Advance feel free to reach out to me and let me know!